Misinformation haunts 2020 primaries | Axios

Despite broad efforts to crack down on misinformation ahead of the 2020 election, the primary season so far has been chock full of deceptive messages and misleading information.

Why it matters: More sophisticated tactics that have emerged since 2016 threaten to derail the democratic process by further polluting online debate. And the seemingly unending influx of fakery could plant enough suspicion and cynicism to throw an otherwise legitimate election into question.

The big picture: Social media platforms, which host the greatest volume of misinformation, have gotten wise to basic techniques used in previous elections, and now regularly take down swaths of accounts they say are fake or meddlesome.

• In response, trolls both foreign and domestic have developed new attacks.
• But plenty of simple bots that appear to be foreign controlled still slip through the companies’ automated sieves, experts say, further endangering the already-precarious coming elections.

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